


Vinyl Advice: Wrong From Right

by mockturtletale



Series: Vinyl Advice: [2]
Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Music AU, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:10:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only then does Harvey sever the connection and hold his music in his hand with Mike’s mixed in.<br/>He looks out at the ocean, listens to his heart beat in time with the waves as they wash in and away and he closes his eyes as his thumb pushes ‘play’ and then Harvey slowly, willingly, starts to drown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vinyl Advice: Wrong From Right

  
  
**Notes** : This is the next arc of Vinyl Advice. Warning for moderate angst. This gets a little ouch-y.

 

 

 

  
[Part I](http://archiveofourown.org/works/270696)

[   
](http://mockturtletale.dreamwidth.org/2262.html)

  
{there are three mixes for this section;

[VA:Mike](http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?42ogjy9ayeypenp), 59.13mb, 12 tracks.  
[VA:Harvey](http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mxl291bakjif98l), 53.7i9mb, 12 tracks.  
[VA:H&M](http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?j2qcwifs5uws3wk), 15.24mb, 3 tracks.

[please note; as of 2013 and I'm having trouble keeping these zips up and available to download, but here are the track listings: 

VA:Mike: [](http://imgur.com/Xlj0BDk)

VA:Harvey: [](http://imgur.com/ZYlzpiW)

Va:H&M: [](http://imgur.com/4vF3omN)

I'm really sorry about the inconvenience, I guess the issue is that the files keep catching attention because they've got hundreds of downloads, but I'm still trying to find a way around it as of May 2013. ]

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________

 

 

That’s what they’d thought. What they’d both wanted. Tentatively touched for with unsteady hands.

It’s not what happens.

  
_________________________________________________

 

Jessica strides into Harvey’s office without knocking, without giving Donna a minute to alert him that he was about to have company, but she never does so that can’t explain the hesitance in her gait, the way she tries so hard to conceal it.

But he understands as soon as she spreads the stack of black and white photographs across his desk. They fan out, cheap glossy glimpses of something that’s none of her business. She’s angry and she’s frightened and she’s disappointed and she’s sorry and Harvey sees all of that as clear as the pictures he collects up and shuffles back into order, stows away in his desk where they belong, with him, not out in the air, not on paper, certainly not in anyone else’s hands.

Later, when she’s gone, he’ll take them out and look at each one. At first he’ll see hope. So bright and clear, shining from his and Mike’s faces like they’ve cracked wide open to spill all they are between them, perfectly mirrored expressions saying everything Harvey had thought they meant to tell one another. Their hands are touching in every second frame, meeting for records and money and receipts and _music_ , passed like willing sacrifice. But then he remembers her words and the light dies, bleeds out of the pictures as he watches, tries to find it again but fails. Whatever he saw a second ago ….. Jessica took that. It’s probably for the best. Probably.

She says she’s worried. That she never intended to break his trust, won’t ever do so again just as long as he promises never to make her have to.

He tries to tell her that he was happy. That he found something. That his silence wasn’t a warning.

He tries to tell her how he feels, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how to explain it to someone who can’t understand and he tries not to listen to what she says for the same reason, because this is one area she can never have the last word on. She’s his boss and she’s his friend and he loves her and he trusts her and she saved his life, once upon a time.

Harvey doesn’t know how to say thank you, thank you for your concern, thank you for trying, thank you for everything, but this isn’t your place.

Jessica saved his life, once upon a time, but Harvey feels like Mike is about to breathe it back into him.

He doesn’t have to explain that part to Jessica, because she knows enough of that subject to make him stutter and skip. She lectures him on gold digging twenty-somethings looking to cash in on their looks and nothing he says or does will ever really adequately show how sorry he is for how, how ashamed of it he is, but he listens. Not to all of it, not to the central message, but the general idea sets something clawing loose in him, sends him falling for it.

He’s needed this. He’s been looking for a solid reason to second guess himself, and Jessica - the closest thing he has to a true friend in the world, the most tangible sense of authority he could ever almost concede to - she is misguided, and she is wrong. She loves Harvey and he loves her and it’s because of that that he can use her like this. As a sword to let himself fall on.

Harvey has had longer without this to convince himself that it doesn’t exist.

Harvey is scared and sure that he’s wrong, that this is going to fall apart in his hands if he dares try to touch it.

Harvey is terrified that it won’t.

___________________________________________________

As it only can when faced with possibilities that have the potential to send everything skyward, the universe intervenes.

It steps between two forces that are each formidable in their own right. Forces that would combine to spawn universes. Forces that were set apart, lost and alone in the world, to stay that way.

In union, the beginning, the end.

  
____________________________________________________

  
Mike hates himself for it. He hates himself for it before it even happens, because it’s always going to. The thread of past pain, too deep to ever dig loose, calls to him. Familiar in a way that the heat just out of reach promises to burn him to his bones, slighter than the suggestion in comparison, but real and already his. Better the devil you know, he supposes.

It’s always been about pain for Mike. It’s about pain for anyone who knows how it truly feels to love music, more than you can love another person, more than life or death or anything that could happen to you in between.

It’s about cutting himself open to it, on it. Letting it sink inside and trusting it not to lodge where it doesn’t belong, in clots that kill him, slow but sure. Music is pure and good. But the human heart is flawed, delicate and weak and prone to mistakes that send it skittering. It interprets things wrong. It forms attachments, weak and broken mental links to memories that don’t belong in sound, certainly have no claim to bind themselves to songs they have nothing to do with. But it happens anyway, and a thousand times worse for Mike.

Every important thing that’s ever happened to him has a sound. Is tied to a song, an album, a band. He never chooses them, can do nothing at all to loose the knot. All he can really do to stay afloat is try to steer his way clear of soundtracks he can’t control. Stores that tune into radio stations. Music channels on tv. The shuffle function is a minefield.

Certain songs are anchors. Buried so deep so long ago that Mike doesn’t even remember the feeling they’re tied to until he hears it dragging him under.

The voice on the phone is one he won’t ever be able to forget. It flares up inside him like nothing else can, not yet, and he follows it down.

It’s different now. It’s harder to hear. He strains forward to grasp at it where it would have gutted him before and it’s oceans and miles of difference, but the same central point, a pinprick still aimed sure enough to fell him.

And so he falls, and he goes.

He thinks of ways to tell Harvey that he’s leaving, that he has to go to Montana for reasons that Harvey would understand and hate as much as Mike does if he explained them, but after hours spent thinking of the ways he will inevitably reveal his flaws to Harvey he realizes he’s getting ahead of himself, that he’s about to make the same mistake that he’s still cleaning up now, he’s about to do the very thing that has him travelling a couple of thousand miles to pick up pieces still buried like hot, burning shrapnel under his skin. It’s too soon.

He reigns it in and sets it aside. He won’t do anything to betray how he feels about Harvey, about whatever they’re doing here, before he knows for sure that he can, that it’s okay for him to feel that way. He thinks it is. He’s surer of that than he’s ever been of anything before, but that fact drives the point on, makes it something too precious for him to ever really trust himself to know.

Mike leaves, and he thinks that by not telling Harvey that he’s going, he’s ensuring he has something to come back to. He’s protecting what he wants by once and for all cleaning up the mess of the one and only time he wasn’t true to who he is. He’s better preparing for what lies ahead, he thinks. And he doesn’t need to tell Harvey of mistakes he made before Harvey showed him he doesn’t have to, he thinks.

It’s burning the crumbling bridges that tempt him back.

It’s moving on, once and for all.

It’s an end to mark their beginning,

he thinks.

____________________________________________

He’s wrong.

Harvey goes to Criminal Records in search of confirmation, in search of assurances he doesn’t deserve because he has no right to question this, no right to question Mike and no reason to believe he doesn’t have to.

This is what happens when how they feel about music gets caught in the brambles of real life. It gets twisted and torn, jagged edges turned sharp and pushed inward. The two can’t exist independently and can’t always survive together. Something always has to give. It’s rarely music, which can’t hurt like life does, can’t surprise them or disappoint them or fall away when they need it most. It’s always there, to make everything better or worse, always simply _more_.

But when they try to force it to sit in shapes and quantities that translate here, fail to force it into legible states it can’t and won’t succumb to, music stays more. It rises up to be more than they can make sense of when they look at it from here. When they try to see it from anywhere other than right in it it’s too much, more than they know how to feel and more than they can stand to see.

Harvey goes to see Mike here and Mike isn’t here and then he isn’t there.

Without Mike here to show Harvey that he’s there, Harvey falls.

Jenny tells Harvey that Mike is away, that he’ll be back in a week, that he had to leave on short notice, that she’d thought Mike would have told Harvey. The way she says that last is a confession, admittance. They haven’t talked about it and Mike has said even less about it to Jenny, but she’s seen more than enough to know what’s happening, where they’re going. It’s plain to see in how he looks when he’s with Harvey. It’s written right across his face when he comes home after long shifts when Harvey hasn’t been in. It’s roared in the white noise and static between the songs he listens to. Harvey should know that better than she, better than anyone.

All Harvey knows is that Mike isn’t here. Mike isn’t here to reassure him, even without saying anything at all, that _they_ have a ‘there’. Harvey shouldn’t need Mike or anyone else to tell him how he feels, to show him what he knows, but Harvey is weak in that moment, the ‘here’ of it all whispered in his ear by Jessica making what he can’t see when he isn’t absolutely in it seem like something he can’t trust when he’s anywhere else.

Harvey turns away from things he can’t stand to see and refuses to listen to where he should know to find all he needs to hear.

  
_______________________________

  
He stays away. Mike comes home and Harvey sees him from his window, watches him cut through the crowds on the sidewalk like oil in water, the only thing Harvey really, truly sees.

But still he refuses to listen.

He pretends that Mike is just as out of focus as everyone else now, denies the sharp, excruciating detail of every little thing about him that claws at Harvey from the inside out every time his eyes track his movements, on the days when he’s early and walks light and leisurely, seems to bloom across the pavement in every step he takes. On the days, more often, when he’s running late and running literally, jogging up the street and dodging bodies with a practised ease that comes with being comfortable in your own skin and against everyone else’s.

Harvey doesn’t know what that feels like anymore.

He’s hollow now. And somehow the knowledge that it’s no-one’s fault but his makes it worse, makes the empty space between his ribs echo his regret loud and tinny against his bones.

Eventually, he decides that making it worse might just make it better. Because sometimes, with some things, music can do that. Music can push a feeling so far down your throat that you metabolize it as something new, some brighter than before. It burns on the way down, but if you can survive that, if you can get past that, sometimes you can learn something from that, sometimes you can force progress from what would be an otherwise passive pain. Music makes it worse and then makes you better.

Harvey knows this better than anyone.

So he goes home one night, after an evening worse than any he can remember in a very long time.

Mike had been an hour early for his shift. Harvey had been looking out the window of his office, staring down into the street from five floors above where he’s safe and alone and safe and miserable, already looking for what he gave up before it was his when Mike appears.

He walks slower than Harvey has ever seen, and his earbuds swing around his neck, the bright green buds falling against his chest. He gets to the middle of the sidewalk right outside the steps up to Harvey’s building and he pauses. He stands still, looking at the ground, for what feels like hours. And then he looks up. Harvey watches his head rise as his eyes find each floor, first, second, third, fourth. And then Mike pauses.

Harvey knows Mike can’t see him from that far down, couldn’t even if the glass wasn’t slightly mirrored on the outside. But he still feels the burn of Mike’s gaze, fierce and hot through glass and rising five floors and decimating the space between them.

Harvey turns away again.

And when he gets home he realizes he hasn’t spoken a word to anyone since he turned away from where Mike was seeking him out. Couldn’t even bring himself to return Donna’s surprised ‘Goodbye?’ when he’d left the office soon after.

He doesn’t know what to say to anyone. He doesn’t know what to say for himself.

So he sits at the desk in his home office and hits ‘play’ on the mix Mike made him.

He hopes it’ll sound different now. He hopes he’ll make it through the whole thing and realize that it’s just sound, just a random collection of songs that sound good and mean nothing at all. He listens closely and carefully, desperate for vindication. Desperate for any small hint that Mike isn’t what Harvey thought he was, _who_ Harvey thought he was. Desperate to know that Mike doesn’t get it and never has, that Harvey made a mistake and has done what’s necessary to minimize the fall out from that before it became catastrophic, before it ruined him.

In the silence that fills his ears when the mix ends, Harvey hears nothing but accusation.

Damning confirmation of what he’s really done.

  
__________________________________________

Mike is utterly miserable.

Montana drained him, left him empty and sore. And it should have been a good kind of ache - the kind that means you worked too hard and moved too fast and did more than you thought you were capable of and get to sit back and feel the burn of that while you rest and re-cooperate. It should have been the painful start of something new.

But Harvey has stopped coming into the store. And he hasn’t responded to any of Mike’s emails.

Mike has no idea what happened, but he blames himself, he thinks Harvey thinks that he left him and he wants to explain that he didn’t, that he did the opposite, that he went away and didn’t say because he wanted to come home and stay but Harvey doesn’t respond to any of Mike’s emails that say as much and he thinks this is it, he thinks Harvey is out, regrets it before it even had a chance to happen.

Mike feels loss like he never has before. He never knew what it was to have this kind of understanding, to find someone who got it and was willing to share.

Twenty four years of not having it at all is nothing on finding it and losing it all within the space of a month.

He’s angry and he’s frustrated and he thinks that this whole mess could be so easily fixed, is so needlessly fucked. But then he drags himself home to his bed and falls onto the covers, headphones in hand, and hears what he couldn’t admit as he stares wide-eyed and shivering at the cracked ceiling over his head.

Mike throws up when he realizes, when he finally accepts that Harvey isn’t coming back, won’t let Mike drag him back into this. Such is the weight of his grief - he can’t hold it in, can’t keep it down. He falls to his knees in the cold, dark bathroom of an apartment that had been so much bigger, so much brighter lately, and he retches until not even the lining of his stomach is still his own. He slumps weak and exhausted against the porcelain and he doesn’t have the energy, but if he did, he thinks he’d cry.

_______________________________________

It arrives to Harvey’s office five days later. Five days since he’s started to find any reason at all to be anywhere but in his office by the window in the evenings.

The envelope simply says his name and looks to have been hand delivered, no postage stamp to be seen, but the mail room know there is only one ‘Harvey Specter’ they need to know, even though he’s sure the ‘primo asshole’ title is one they weren’t aware he’d won. The handwriting has an unmistakably feminine slant to it and Harvey recognizes it from name tags, from white boards and sale signs.

Jenny.

He can’t bring himself to be offended. She’s right.

Inside the envelope is another cd, this one in an orange case and with no tracklisting, no title, nothing but a post-it stuck inside the front cover which reads ‘the new soundtrack to Mike’s life. FIX THIS.’

Harvey doesn’t know what to expect.

He tells Donna he’s leaving early, that he doesn’t feel well and he has to leave and she should cancel all of his appointments.

He calls Ray and he gets him to drive him out to Fire Island, to one of the only places Harvey has ever really been able to think freely, away from everything, and he gets Ray to leave him there to do just that. He’ll stay the night maybe. He’ll find his own way back. He’ll take the ferry. He’ll walk. He’ll swim. He doesn’t care.

The two hours it takes to drive out is a second, two, three at most.

Harvey sits with his back against a bench that’s been warmed by the sun on a day when it’s shone high since morning, and only then does he detach the usb chord from his ipod, only then does he sever the connection and hold his music in his hand with Mike’s mixed in.

He looks out at the ocean, listens to his heart beat in time with the waves as they wash in and away and he closes his eyes as he thumb pushes ‘play’ and then Harvey slowly, willingly, starts to drown.

  
_______________________________

VA: Mike

_______________________________

The first song is so quiet. So delicate and softly paced, gentle piano notes that sound like rain drops, tear drops. The voice is devastating, devastated. Betrayed and sure in it, lost and severed and better for being so. The first song is grateful that you’ve broken it’s heart.

  
_______________________________

The second song is still quiet. Still too disappointed to raise it’s voice, too far gone to care enough to shout and scream. But there is blame here, creeping in with muffled drum beats that get sharp, that stay that way. The second song is still broken hearted, but cruel about it now. Hurting you and itself and not sorry for either. There’s balance here, the first hint of it. A give and take, a you and me and the pull between, the snap of it taken and given back.

_______________________________

  
The third is a curious mix of the first real admission of pain and the first sense of recovery from it, in guilt for it. It says ‘You hurt me, but I knew you would’, and Harvey knows that Mike didn’t mean for him to hear this, and that makes it so much more painful to hear. It’s ‘goodbye’. And three minutes in it says what Harvey realizes Mike must think. He didn’t think he had it in him to be any sorrier than he had been.

  
_______________________________

The fourth song is worse than drowning. It’s a band that Harvey recognizes the sound and tightly wound intensity of, one that Mike has had him listen to before, one that he knows means a lot to him. The song says everything there is to know about them. It says nothing of what’s happened since, only sings of everything they’d had with a tone of lament that says everything else. Even as the singer pleads for him to ‘promise to let it grow’, Harvey can hear that he doesn’t truly believe he will, that he can, that he’ll listen. But he does listen. And at 2:30, he hears something that isn’t exactly what it sounds like, but so much more besides.

  
______________________________

  
The fifth song sounds like Harvey feels, only with different words, words that mean the very opposite of what he would like them to. The song ends, except it doesn’t, it goes silent, and then something else, the same but not at all, picks back up, and this song is Harvey’s heart. Slow and sad and muted and thick with it, paused and picked back up the worse for it. He doesn’t want Mike to listen to this song. He doesn’t want Mike to feel like this, to think that this is true, to think that this is what he’d meant to say. And by letting him believe that, it’s exactly what he’d said.

  
_______________________________

  
The sixth song is the saddest Harvey has ever heard.

  
_______________________________

  
The rest of the mix is soaked in regret. It’s hurt and confusion and anger at times, quiet and desperate. The final song sounds like all of that settled, poured over to set new and less and smooth and clean. Empty and final.

Harvey wants to tear it away. Wants to dig down into all the things it covers and pull them up to rip them to pieces. He doesn’t want to fix this, he wants to break the entire thing apart with his hands and start again.

He’s known almost since he did it that this was a mistake, that this was something he’d regret.

But he’d done it anyway.

And after he had …... he’d felt lesser. He’d felt human and flawed and all of the things that he naturally is, but with Mike and with this, it hadn’t felt like enough, it had felt like too far. Because there, with music, it wasn’t enough to be human, to make mistakes and apologize. You can’t say with words and actions things that are bigger and beyond both.

But sitting here with the sun on his face and the sound of his mistakes ringing in his ears, Harvey looks out to sea and in the current he sees the answer, on the crest of waves he finds a way.

  
____________________________________________________

  
VA:Harvey

  
______________________________________

It takes him three days and more hours than he could count on his fingers and toes, but when he attaches the zip file to an email with the subject ‘I’m Sorry. Listen’, Harvey feels lighter than he has since he almost lost this. Even if he still has, even if he deserves that …. this is honesty. This is his honest effort. And he thinks for the first time in his life, it sounds exactly right. Just as he means it to.

  
________________________________________

Mike doesn’t want to get his hopes up. He still doesn’t know what happened and he has no idea if this will fix it, but he wants to hear what Harvey has to tell him, so after he locks up he wanders back upstairs, back into the listening booth where Harvey showed him how to find his way back, and he listens.

________________________________________

The Twista song is a surprise to say the least.

It’s …. Mike loves Sigur Ros, and he unironically listens to rap music all the time, but it’s a combination that he’d never in a thousand years have thought might work, and it’s one that he can’t believe Harvey is bringing to him.

But once the two really blend together, it stops being about words against violins, this versus that. It’s union. It takes Mike a minute or two or three and nine seconds, but when he hears it, he can’t help but smile. It’s two things that should work together, but they do, and Harvey’s saying they can. That maybe if you bring the two together, one won’t threaten the other, and neither can win.

  
_________________________________________

Sleepyhead is a current obsession of Mike’s, but Harvey has of course managed to find a version from a session that he’d missed. It’s stripped down - stripped _bare_ and it’s like a different song, means something else entirely. It takes Mike’s breath away all over again. It’s the start of this, it’s the first bulbs of spring, fighting up through frost and snow to air and light for color, for them.

_________________________________________

He thinks he’s going to throw up again when he listens to the third song, by a band he’s never heard of. It’s the darkest thing he’s ever heard. So silently vicious. It’s hammers in the dark, cartilage ripped from bone, fists through glass. When he hears the line “just put an ear to the ground where you did it - wait for them to come”, he knows. He sees. He understands.

________________________________________

  
Mike listens to the song about men made of snow and his heart aches for Harvey. The last song showed him how and this one explains why. Mike sinks down to the floor and drags his knees up to his chest, fits his elbows in between his thighs and his heart thudding in his chest and he pushes his hands up into his hair and holds on.

  
________________________________________

  
He doesn’t need to hear the next song, but he knows why Harvey had to say it. He would have too.

  
________________________________________

  
The Sufjan Stevens song is one that Mike has heard but never really listened closely to before. It’s …. this one is more about the sound than the words, he thinks. It’s jagged. Jangled. Sounds tumbled together that somehow fit and sound right against one another, with one another.

  
________________________________________

  
He smiles when he gets to the Al Green song, even though he shouldn’t, not really. It’s always been a song that breaks his heart a little bit every time he hears it, but it’s … it’s productive pain, an ache that builds. It’s a very ‘Harvey’ inclusion, and it falls from Mike’s ears down around his neck, plaits itself along his spine and winds around his waist and wrists like a warmth he hasn’t felt in weeks.

  
________________________________________

  
The Bloc Party song surprises him again. The choice especially. ‘Skeleton’ is a rare track for this band, a very early release that isn’t at all popular or widely known. It’s a song that’s always hit Mike hard and hearing it now, here, in this context, from Harvey it hits him all over again, just as hard. It’s not from Harvey to Mike, it’s to Mike about Harvey, explanation of how he felt before Mike, what he is without him. Mike listens and he knows exactly what Harvey means.

  
________________________________________

  
The Feist song is the first real sense of hope here, Mike thinks. It’s acceptance of their situation and their reality and maybe tentative hope that they can start to figure out how that works when they bring it together between them. It sounds to Mike like Harvey’s saying ‘I did this, and I didn’t have to, but I know what I have to do now, and I’m ready to do it’.

  
________________________________________

  
When Mike hears the first few bars of that Jackson Five song, he starts to cry. He couldn’t tell you why if he tried. He’s happy and he’s relieved and he’s so fucking overwhelmed by all of this and everything that happened in the lead up to it and it’s like he’s been on edge this entire time, just waiting for everything to get somehow worse, so when he hears this song …. it’s a hysterical reaction. Incredulous, delighted laughter turned to tears.

When it ends, he remembers what it feels like to be able to breathe again.

_________________________________________

  
The next song steals his breath away again, like only Harvey really could right after giving it back to him. It’s such a charged sound, so full and biting, like excruciating, agonizing relief, begged for. It’s the perfect mirrored force of them and everything they could potentially be, and it makes Mike dizzy. It makes him barely able to sit still and wait for whatever’s going to come next.

  
_________________________________________

  
‘Thinking About You’ is brazen. Teeth and bones bared, daring you to take it, fighting to make you take it to heart. It’s so sure, so full. Mike is floored by it. And then he gets to the 1:20 point in the song, and he knows with absolute conviction that this is them - this is how they’ll be and this is what they’ll never need to doubt ever again, because they are how this sounds - they are unapologetic and they are _more_. They are all.

  
_________________________________________

Mike doesn’t go home that night. He listens to the mix twice over, then a third time, and then he leaves Criminal Records without ever taking his earbuds out, and he walks around the city until the sun rises and brings with it his conviction.

He’s heard what Harvey has to say, and he understands why he did what he did, and more than that - he knows that they’re both ready now. That they’ve both made mistakes, and they’ve both been second-guessing this. It makes him laugh, to realize that they both want it so badly that they were actually able to convince themselves that it wasn’t something they deserved.

What matters is that they’re both here, now.

Through that mix Harvey showed Mike that he wasn’t about to let this go, that he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to get this back and to keep it.

Mike goes to tell Harvey the same thing.

____________________________________

Harvey hasn’t slept at all. He sent the email and attachment to Mike at 9pm the night before and 7am finds him exhausted, drained and fragile without sleep but kept upright by the sheer force of his worry and his hope, each in equal measures. He has done everything he can. And he thinks it’s not a case of whether or not that’s enough, but a matter instead of having tried, of having committed to it, truly.

When he gets to work, Mike is waiting for him, sitting on a bench in the foyer with his hands in his pockets, leaning back against the glass that rises as the front of the building with his head tilted back. The skin under his eyes is stretched and bruised, thin and delicate enough to show the fissures of his veins. His hair is a mess and he clearly hasn’t slept. He’s gorgeous. He’s the best thing Harvey has ever seen. And when Harvey comes to stand before him, looks down with what he hopes isn’t too obvious a question on his face, Mike smiles up at him, small and quiet and nothing that should make Harvey’s heart feel like it’s suddenly three times the size it was a second ago and too big, too much for his chest, but it does anyway.

“You’re kind of incredibly stupid,” Mike says, and Harvey laughs, the sound startled out of him and sent skittering across the marble floor.

Harvey sits down next to him, drops his briefcase to the floor and takes Mike’s hand in his, laces their fingers together for the very first time without any excuse to, none necessary.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he says to their knuckles.

“That’s okay,” Mike says.

“Me too,” Mike says.

“Wanna grab breakfast?” Harvey asks, looking up into Mike’s face finally, and it’s too soon, too much to see him sitting there, looking back at Harvey, tired and happy.

They’ve bared their very souls to one another, admitted to themselves what’s inside and what they’re made of. They’ve accepted that and given it to one another, given it over into what will be _them_ , together.

When Harvey looks into Mike’s eyes now, he knows he has nothing left to hide, he sees for himself that Mike sees him exactly as he is, for who he is and everything that’s true of him, for them.

“Yes, please,” Mike says, and he’s still smiling and he’s still there and his right hand is still in Harvey’s.

“And when we’re finished, we’re bringing Jenny all of her favorite breakfast foods in the entire world,” Harvey declares as they stand up and walk out of the building into the early morning sun.

“Do I ….. should I know why we’re doing that?” Mike asks, and Harvey will tell him eventually, and Mike will be furious at Jenny, and so thankful he won’t know how to say so, but for now Harvey just says

“She’s a good friend,” and Mike agrees.

They eat at a tiny diner around the corner, pressed together into one side of a booth like they can’t bear to sit across from one another, because they can’t. Mike steals bites of Harvey’s pancakes even though he insisted he didn’t want any, and Harvey makes fun of Mike for taking ten minutes to decide if he wanted nutella or strawberries with his crepes, and really should have seen it coming when he eventually decides on both. Before they leave, they grab a carry out order of everything Mike assures Harvey will make Jenny ‘the happiest person on earth’ and when he says that Harvey only has to turn slightly toward Mike, catch his eye for just a second and quickly lift an eyebrow for Mike to grin back at him, getting it and silently agreeing.

These are the songs that play as they wait, and this is how they feel:

  
____________________________

VA:H&M

____________________________


End file.
